The literature of the estates of the world, so clearly developed in medieval France and England, was further enriched for the modern reader by the publication in 1936 of the fifteenth-century satire Mum and the Sothsegger. Discovered in the west country, near the locale of Piers Plowman, to which it bears a number of similarities, it reviews the condition of “all kinds of estates,“ from king to peasant, in the eventful last days of Richard II and the early years of the reign of Henry IV. Though a part of the newly discovered manuscript is a fragment of alliterative verse already published under the title Richard the Redeles, the much larger part concerning the case of Mum and the Truthteller was unknown to modern readers and seems to have been largely neglected since its publication. The question of the relation of the two fragments is unsettled, but since in the sixteenth century they were known as one poem under the title of Mum, Sothsegger, since their language and form are identical, and since certain ideas in the two parts are closely related, there is good reason for considering them here together as parts of a single poem.